PAX13 – Super Comboman Hands-On Preview

If you had a childhood, odds are you remember how stickers were a thing at some point. You might also remember some packs that provided you with a scene or cityscape for you to place all your stickers on and create your own badass moments. This was essentially the inspiration for the new side-scrolling action adventure game Super Comboman.

In Super Comboman, you play as Struggles, who may look like a piece of sticker paper, but he packs quite a punch. In my time playing Super Comboman, I immediately dug the controls and art style, simple yet visceral. Creative Director Justin Woodward told me that he and the team at Interabang Entertainment were mostly striving to capture that fighting style in a Marvel vs. Capcom or Super Smash. Bros game and put it in an action-adventure game. Thankfully, they did, and it works very well.

The plot basically revolves around a guy called Struggles who’s out to support his little brother with a job on a construction site. However, instead of doing his job normally, he just chooses to emulate his favorite superhero Super Comboman instead and pummels everyone else into submission. Pummeling everyone wasn’t a walk in the park though. Parrying and countering becomes pretty important, especially when facing multiple enemies, but it would require some practice to fully master, like the majority of the game.

I’m sure Supervisor Fapjack has been plenty busy.

Armed with mighty fists and a magical fanny pack, fighting as Struggles is a blast. There were still a couple of kinks in the controls as the control-stick directions were a bit finicky as I played with an Xbox 360 controller, but the d-pad worked just fine. Combos were the most satisfying part of the game though, as they don’t exactly work like your standard fighting game, where combos come down to how many hits you can land before the enemy has time to regroup, but rather how many hits you can land at all before the combo meter runs out, so you can imagine watching those numbers stack felt very rewarding. As the game progresses and you unlock more abilities and combos, I presume it’ll only get that much more awesome.

From a Kickstarter project to the build I played at PAX Prime 2013, Super Comboman is shaping up to be an excellent side-scrolling action platformer. We’ll update you as soon as a release date comes around, but for now, you can pre-order Super Comboman for Steam and DRM Free right here.